Current electronic displays provide crisp, highly detailed images. Whether these displays are on televisions, computer monitors, tablets or phones, the displays can project images that are highly accurate to real life. One downside to such displays is the correspondingly large amount of data needed to drive the displays. Most high-resolution display screens are made of thousands or millions of individual pixels, each of which is illuminated according to display data that includes an intensity value and/or color value for each pixel.
One way to reduce the amount of data needed to drive the display is to dither the display data. Dithering is a process that gives a display the ability to display greyscale or color values that it doesn't have, while at the same time reducing the number of bits that need to be transferred to the screen. In traditional implementations, dithering is a strictly linear operation that takes a spatially linear average of the object that is to be represented in the image. Once the dithering has been performed, the data can be converted to non-linear sRGB (standard red, green and blue) to reduce bandwidth. This conversion from linear RGB (red, green, blue) to non-linear sRGB and then back again to linear for the electronic display costs multiple operations per pixel per frame. As such, the conventional dithering process, including receiving sRGB data, linearizing it, dithering it, processing it, transmitting it in sRGB (to save bandwidth), and then converting it back to linear data for the display screen, is computationally expensive and burdensome.